“It is clearly an inadequate response,” U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday.
A Western diplomat in Vienna told Reuters, “This written position is a non-event because it’s nothing new. It just makes official what the Iranians have been saying.”
Russia, France, the United States and the IAEA proposed on October 1 that Iran send 1,200 kilos of its uranium enriched to 5 percent to Russia, which would raise the enrichment to 20 percent and send the uranium to France to be fashioned into uranium-aluminum alloy fuel rods of the type used in the small Tehran reactor.
Iran countered orally that it would not send its uranium out of the country until it first received the fuel rods, stating that it was concerned Russia and France might just seize its uranium and never send it fuel rods.
The major powers said the Iranian proposal defeated the whole purpose of the Western draft, which was to establish some level of mutual confidence and trust by having Iran send out enough uranium that it could not physically make a nuclear warhead until the end of 2010.